Life in general, fiber arts in particular, near Twisp in the beautiful Methow Valley

Rescue Road

We’ve had several thunder and lightning storms, with heavy rain, this past week. Last Saturday, when I came back from a guild meeting in Omak (sorry, no pictures) it was completely black up to the north. Ominous looking. Sure enough, as I headed up to Winthrop it started raining heavily. Huge big splats of rain, and wind. The road was awash with water. Some of you probably know that it was during this storm that George Shangrow, who was a conductor, pianist and radio host in Seattle, died in a car crash en route to deliver a pre-concert lecture at the Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival.

On Tuesday I was down at the Spinners and Weavers guild room, weaving some towels on my loom there. Our guild room is about halfway between Winthrop and Twisp, on a loop road off Hwy 20 called the Old Twisp Highway. It runs along pretty close to the Methow River.

It started blowing and raining heavily. All of a sudden there were two women out in front of the building, in bathing suits and carrying inner tubes! I let them into the vestibule and got them some towels. They had been out floating on the river when the storm started, and were getting hailed on, then one of their tubes started leaking and deflating. They pulled out of the river and starting walking back north, trying to get back to their car. They said they had been walking for a while, and a woman in a car had passed them and just ignored them. They were pretty wet and cold by the time they got to the guild building.

So we threw their tubes in the back of my car and I gave them a ride up to where they had parked just north of where our road comes out on the highway.

Two days later, I am driving up to the guild room again, from Twisp. It’s a nice sunny day this time. Two young men in swim trunks were thumbing a ride on the Old Twisp Highway, heading north. I stopped but they needed a ride to Winthrop and I was only going up the road a little way. So a little while later, there I am weaving away, and they show up in front of the building. It turned out they also had equipment malfunction of some sort while floating the river. So I gave them a ride up to the main highway, where they had a better chance of getting a ride back up to town.

I’m beginning to feel like a river tubers’ taxi service!

I finished weaving those towels, washed and dried them, but they still need to be hemmed. I promise some pictures, plus ones of the rugs I have been weaving at home, in an upcoming post.